What Else Is Affected?
Now I am going to be the bearer of even worse news, as if you thought this was just about shelling out a bit more for RAM sticks and SSDs, I’ve got some bad news for you. This shortage is bleeding into everything that relies on memory, and that list is a lot longer than you might think.
The biggest elephant in the room is graphics cards. We finally got to a point where GPU pricing was somewhat sensible, but that’s all about to change too. Your graphics card needs VRAM, usually GDDR6 or the newer GDDR7, and guess where that comes from? The same fabrication plants that are currently too busy making HBM for AI data centres.
While Nvidia and AMD aren’t using HBM for their consumer cards yet, the production lines for GDDR memory are being squeezed to make room for the enterprise stuff. We’re already hearing reports from board partners that the cost of VRAM modules is going up. That means the RTX 50-series and RDNA 4 cards aren’t just going to be expensive because they’re the newest generation on the market; they’re going to be expensive because the memory on them costs significantly more to produce than it did for the previous generation.
There’s talk of AMD increasing the cost of their GPUs by $10 for every 8GB. So if you’re looking for a GPU with 16GB of VRAM? That’s an extra $20, and that’s just the start. We already spoke before about how NVIDIA likely won’t release the 50 SUPER series refresh because of this whole situation, and instead of being a CES 2026 announcement, it will bleed into Q3 of next year. That then puts it too close to the RTX 60 series Rubin GPUs, making it even less likely that a refresh of Blackwell-based GPUs will even happen.
It’s not just the components with memory chips on them that are suffering; the knock-on effect is hitting other parts of the industry hard. We actually reported recently that motherboard sales have seen a sharp decline, with some major manufacturers reporting drops of up to 50%, and it’s not hard to see why. When a decent kit of DDR5 costs nearly as much as the motherboard itself, people simply aren’t upgrading. They’re holding onto their old platforms longer, which means motherboard manufacturers are seeing their stock gather dust because the cost of entry for a new platform has just become too high for the average gamer to swallow.
Then you have laptops. In the desktop market, you can at least choose to hold off on a RAM upgrade or buy a cheaper kit for now. With a laptop, you’re stuck with what you buy, especially now that soldered memory is the norm. Laptop manufacturers operate on razor-thin margins, and they can’t just eat a 30% or 40% increase in memory and storage costs. Instead, they’re going to pass that straight on to you. We expect to see the “entry-level” gaming laptop price floor raise significantly in 2025 and the days of finding a decent spec laptop for under a grand might be paused for a while.
Even consoles aren’t safe. Microsoft and Sony use huge pools of unified GDDR6 memory in the Xbox and PlayStation. While they have long-term contracts that shield them from day-to-day spot price fluctuations, they aren’t immune forever. If this shortage drags on through 2026 as predicted, don’t be surprised if we see price hikes on hardware, or at the very least, a complete disappearance of those holiday bundle deals we’re used to seeing.
Beyond that, think about anything that has some form of memory in it, from smartphones, to tablets and even the things you use daily that you don’t even think about. A monitor, which has, albeit a small amount of memory for retaining the OSD settings that you dial in, or a keyboard with onboard memory to remember your macros or RGB lighting settings. The simple fact is that anything, and everything could be affected.
